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So, you're tasked with (re)igniting innovation at your company. 
Maybe when your company was smaller and leaner, innovation felt like it came naturally. But now, your team feels slower, heavier, and more risk averse. 
Maybe you've been a fast follower in the market, and it's time to become the pioneer. 
Or maybe things are going great and you’re simply looking to scale—without losing your innovative edge. 
A client recently framed the challenge to me this way: “At our company, we talk a lot about being innovative. But I’m not sure what we are actually doing to make it happen.” 
Sound familiar? You already know the goal: to find your way back to that innovative place. To ensure that you don’t lose that magic as your organization grows. The question is, what concrete steps should you be taking? 
If you're like most organizations, your first instinct might be to try to figure out what to add: "What new initiatives, roles, or programs might we implement to address the problem?” 
But what if, instead of thinking about what to add, you consider: "What might be standing in the way of innovation for us right now, and how might we get rid of it?"&nbsp;
In other words, what might we subtract?

Innovation failure modes pages

Five Reasons Why Companies Fail to Innovate

We surveyed 286 leaders on why they sometimes fail—and how they succeed. Here's what we learned.

<h2>Breaking Down Organizational Barriers to Innovation</h2>
If you've read Delve’s recent research report, <a href="https://www.delve.com/five-reasons-why-companies-fail-to-innovate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Failure Modes in Innovation,</a> you may have noticed that four of the five critical failure modes we identified involve barriers to innovation—and that our recommendations for addressing these failure modes involve removing the organizational attitudes and structures that stifle the company’s ability to innovate. (Failure Mode #2, Wait But Why, isn't a structural failure mode. But it's still worth squashing. Learn about all five failure modes in the <a href="https://www.delve.com/five-reasons-why-companies-fail-to-innovate">full report</a>.)

Stop trying to innovate inline3 5 critical failure modes

<ul><li>Failure Mode #1: But First, “Real Work”. Addressing this innovation failure mode involves releasing teams from the relentless pressure of safe, short-term, typically incremental work to regularly make space for more experimental, longer-term, potentially disruptive thinking and doing.</li><li>Failure Mode #3: Infrequent Exposure. Addressing this innovation failure mode requires removing the literal and figurative walls around teams to make it easier for them to learn from one another, from customers, and from the market at large. </li><li>Failure Mode #4: Frozen in Time. Addressing this innovation failure mode requires that organizations let go of proven, historical success to permit them to respond meaningfully to an evolving market. </li><li>Failure Mode #5: Inside the Box. Addressing this innovation failure mode involves releasing ourselves from overly limiting constraints (which may be real or perceived) and giving ourselves the freedom to boldly explore what’s possible.</li></ul>
In <a href="https://www.delve.com/five-reasons-why-companies-fail-to-innovate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Failure Modes in Innovation,</a> we dig deeper into how companies can proactively, consistently, and rigorously manage their failure modes.&nbsp;
But first, it’s only fair to ask, where are these barriers coming from? If we’re having to tear down barriers to innovation, shouldn’t we be looking at what created these barriers in the first place? 
Who or what is ruining the fun? 
<h2>The Myth of the Innovation-Stifling Corporate Leader</h2>
At Delve, we believe that an organization’s natural state is to be innovative. People are naturally curious, creative problem-solvers. Within any organization, of any size, innovation naturally wants to thrive.
But most mature organizations have come to be surrounded by the bulk and weight of the systems and processes they built with the best of intentions: to enable them to function efficiently and effectively. These structures often get in the way of the human tendencies that would otherwise naturally translate to innovative outcomes.
Typically, none of this is the fault of a single, innovation-stifling leader. Keep in mind that corporate leaders are expected to maintain a fragile balance between efficient business optimization and continuous product innovation. The attitudes and behaviors that produce innovative outcomes tend to be casualties of the heavy, complex systems that organizations become as they mature—not intentional acts of innovation sabotage by corporate leaders, who are often simply doing their best to manage dozens of competing influences.

Stop trying to innovate inline2 thrive

<h2>Delve’s Philosophy of Innovation Enablement </h2>
If innovation failure modes stem more from organizational complexity than leadership shortcomings, what must be done? Subtract. 
Leaders too often jump to adding solutions. They build an innovation lab. They institute monthly hack-a-thons. They kick off regular cross-functional happy hours “to encourage more collaboration.” 
But what if instead of creating something new and possibly beneficial, you first focus on abandoning something old and definitely counter-productive? 
What if instead of building new divisions, processes or roles tasked with enshrining innovative thinking and practices long since abandoned by the organization, you first unburden and reactivate those old ways of working? 
Let’s return for a moment to the previous example of the cross-functional happy hour. Instead of expecting a social event to establish a more collaborative culture, ask yourself, “What’s getting in the way of everyday cross-functional collaboration right now?”&nbsp;
People are great at finding problems to solve, they want to creatively solve those problems, and most solutions require collaboration of some form—so what’s stopping that from happening? 
Give it a shot: 
<ol><li>Write down an initiative you’d like to launch to improve innovation at your organization. Even better, name something that is already underway. (For example, “Brainstorming trainings.”) If none come to mind, go straight to (2) below. </li>
<li>Write down the problem the initiative is or was trying to address. Fundamentally, what are you trying to change? (For example, “We need to get better at generating outside-the-box ideas.”) </li>
<li>Ask yourself, “What’s in the way of this change right now?” Write down the barriers that come to mind. (For example, “Budgets keep us from thinking too boldly.”) </li>
<li>Write down some ways to subtract the barrier(s) you identified. Try using this sentence structure: [idea] in order to subtract [barrier]. (For example, “Institute a ‘no-budget’ rule in all brainstorms in order to subtract the limitations of budget within a brainstorming session.”)</li></ol>
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”&nbsp;
The sculptor Michelangelo expressed a similar view about his work. To Michelangelo, a block of marble already contains the perfect sculpture within it; the sculptor’s task is merely to set it free.

Stop trying to innovate inline4 chisel

Similarly, our philosophy is this: Innovation wants to thrive within your organization. The first step to (re)igniting it is to reduce the obstacles that stand in the way. Subtract first, and only then contemplate what you might add. 
If your goal is to foster innovation within your organization, there will always be things you can add and things you can subtract. We recommend starting with the latter. 
Ask yourself what barriers are keeping innovation from thriving in your organization. Then, get rid of them. Chisel away the non-essential bits of organizational marble to liberate the sculpture of innovation eager to be freed. This article was written by Taylor Cone.

Learn more about <a href="https://www.delve.com/services" target="_blank">Product Development & Design Services at Delve.</a>

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